Good critique of Word Press "Gutenberg" -- the sh*tty new behind-the-scenes content editor that is supposed to be mobile- or touch-friendly.
It popped up as the default editing screen when users installed Word Press 5.0 a couple of months ago. We were told if we wanted the old editor we had to install the "Classic Editor" plugin. Needless to say this WP user did that immediately.
The author of the critique, Dedoimedo, likens Gutenberg to Windows 8 and hopes Word Press will follow a similar path of treating it as a failed experiment. He notes that the Classic Editor plugin "has more than 200,000 active installations with a near perfect 5.0 score."
January 2019
two brandenburgs (tape vs vinyl)
I have two versions of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 1, both I Musici performances. The tape, released sometime in the '80s or '90s, consists of a 1965 recording that was digitally remastered and then transferred to audiocassette, on the Philips label.
The vinyl features a later performance, from the mid-'80s, also by I Musici (including some but not all of the same musicians), also on Philips, also digitally mastered, before being pressed on vinyl.
Below are mp3 rips of the same section from the fourth movement, a passage for brass and woodwinds.
I much prefer the tape version! It's punchier and quirkier. The tempo is slightly faster, and the bassoon part (I assume it's a bassoon, might be oboe) is more prominent and percussive. The vinyl version emphasizes the horns over the reeds and feels more slurry and mushy, although still very professionally played.
Tape version, 1965 performance [2.5 MB .mp3]
Vinyl version, 1985 performance [2.6 MB .mp3]
It's tempting to say the 1965 performance is better than the 1985 performance, as in more spirited and distinctively rhythmic. It's hard to say, though, when there are so many electronic aspects to the comparison (recording, mastering, pressing, media type). Simple microphone placement can drastically change classical music. At the mastering stage, certain frequencies can be accentuated or diminished. The tape version has more hiss and the higher frequencies may be adding a "brighter" sound.
suzi gablik and progress
Art writer Suzi Gablik is probably best known for her books theorizing a pluralistic and/or socially conscious art, Has Modernism Failed? and The Reenchantment of Art.
Yet before she became poMo she was a Mo. It's still possible to find moldy copies of her 1977 tome Progress in Art, the thesis of which is that conceptualism in the manner of Sol LeWitt represented evolution in art.
A New York Times review from the '70s, archived online, characterized her book thusly:
[C]ritic and artist Suzi Gablik dares to pose the possibility -- sure to be hotly debated in art circles -- that recent art, especially serial, minimal and conceptual art, is the fruition of a millenia‐long development of the human perceptual faculties. This is, to be sure, not a simple task; but Gablik marshals some impressive arguments in favor of her hypothesis that art, like science, follows an evolutionary route from one stage of development to a higher plane of perceptual integration.
By the mid-'80s, annoyed by art world commodification and Julian Schnabel, she stopped talking about progress. It's interesting to skim the earlier book to see how deeply she imbibed that particular sugary drink before switching to one called "reenchantment." As far as I know she never critiqued her earlier ideas a la Wittgenstein, she just didn't mention them any more.